GARRETT -- Garrett-Keyser-Butler schools will start random drug, alcohol and tobacco tests of students next year, the school board decided Monday. The board voted unanimously to approve the one-year pilot program for grades seven to 12, as long as financing can be secured. The program, estimated to cost $5,000, will be reviewed next spring and will be financed by grants or donations. If money is not available in time to implement the program next fall, it will begin in the first athletic season after money comes through, Superintendent Alan Middleton said. [continues 331 words]
Noble, Steuben Post Significant Decreases Seizures of methamphetamine labs in Indiana fell below 1,000 in 2006 for the first time in four years, the Indiana State Police announced Friday. The state police and other agencies seized 993 labs last year, compared with 1,303 the year before, spokesman Sgt. Rodger Popplewell said. Within the Fort Wayne district, methamphetamine labs dropped from 128 in 2005 to 71 last year, Popplewell said. Several northeast Indiana counties saw dramatic drops. While Noble County again had the highest number of labs in the Fort Wayne district, its total dropped from 47 in 2005 to 24 last year. [continues 432 words]
When I read letters from smokers whining about not being allowed to suck on cigarettes in public, it makes me wonder if all their synapses are clicking. Here are these poor addicts crying about not being allowed to destroy their health and the health of those near them, wringing their hands and ranting about future government interference, never realizing how absurd they sound. My mom used to tell me not to stare at such people. It was hard then, and it still is. [continues 610 words]
Homestead High School Junior Dylan Currie Was the Winner of the Golden Pen Award for September. Dylan Currie, 17, whose letter appeared Sept. 29, has been selected as last month's Golden Pen Award winner. In the judgment of the editors, he had the most effective letter to the editor during September. A junior at Homestead High School, he is involved in student publications, including the school newspaper, the Spartana, and Mirador, the school magazine. He's also involved in student government and has played football. He plans to play lacrosse in the spring. [continues 432 words]
ALBION -- A drug addiction rehabilitation program, know as a drug court, could be part of the Noble County court system by January. Noble County officials applied to establish a drug court in the spring and are waiting for certification by the Indiana Judicial Center. A drug court allows court officials to refer people to the multi-step program where accountability to stop using drugs is key. At the beginning of the program, participants meet with a probation officer several times a week and typically appear before a judge once a week to track their progress. [continues 350 words]
A circuit court judge in Mississippi has ordered a new sentencing trial for Cory Maye, a man sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who had broken into his home in a no-knock drug raid in 2001. Judge Michael Eubanks ruled recently that Maye's legal counsel during the sentencing phase was unconstitutionally inadequate, and he is expected to rule later on requests for a "not guilty" verdict or a new trial. Maye's plight is a case study in the problems with drug policing in America, from questionable confidential informants to invasive paramilitary tactics, overworked and underfunded defense attorneys, and how all of the above seem to disproportionately affect low-income people, particularly African-Americans. [continues 843 words]
Most people are quick to attribute the drop in cigarette, alcohol and drug use among Southwest Allen County Schools students to the random drug testing program that has been placed in the school system's two middle schools and one high school. However, common sense from a student taking those very drug surveys that led to drug testing can prove otherwise. In middle and high school, the anonymous drug surveys given to students are seen as a joke. Not only do kids say they have done drugs that they have not heard of, they fill in the corresponding bubble saying they used cocaine more than 50 times a week as a sixth-grader. Until now, these drug surveys have shown ridiculous numbers of drug users in the district resulting from the anonymity of the test. [continues 189 words]
WASHINGTON - Cut money for the anti-drug advertising campaign, the auditors who advise Congress recommended Friday. The Government Accountability Office said lawmakers should believe a $42.7 million study that panned the eight-year-old TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and Internet ad campaign. The government has spent $1.2 billion since 1998 on ads ranging from "parents, the anti-drug" to the current "above the influence" series. President Bush has asked for $120 million for the program next year. A firm hired to evaluate the campaign said the ads were memorable but seeing them didn't make kids less likely to use marijuana. [continues 218 words]
After A Welcome Decline, Cities Such As Philadelphia, Above, Are Seeing A Resurgence Of Violent Crime. NEW YORK The United States is losing the war in Iraq; more specifically, Philadelphia is. This war is at home, in the city's 12th Police District, where shootings have almost doubled over the past year, and residents have spray-painted "IRAQ" in huge letters on abandoned buildings to mark the devastation. It is a story being repeated up and down the East Coast and across the nation. In Boston, where the homicide rate is soaring, Analicia Perry, a 20-year-old mother, was shot and killed several weeks ago while visiting the street shrine marking the site of her brother's death on the same date four years earlier. Recently, Orlando's homicide count for this year reached 37, surpassing the city's previous annual high of 36 in 1982. And in Washington, D.C., where 14 people were killed in the first 12 days of July, Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a state of emergency. [continues 1965 words]
WABASH, Ind. - Law enforcement officials in rural Wabash County are battling an unusually high incidence of heroin use, an addiction once deemed an urban problem that experts say is being fed by trafficking from the Chicago area. As many as 20 people have regularly traveled to Chicago, where they have bought enough heroin to supply their own consumption plus some extra to sell back home to cover their travel costs, Wabash Police Chief Charles Smith told The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne. [continues 410 words]
There's a newcomer to Homestead High School, but he's 10 years younger than most incoming freshmen. Still, he has a beard. And he's going gray. Hunter, a 4-year-old black Lab-rador retriever, starts his first day of school Wednesday with the rest of Homestead. He's a police dog patrolling for narcotics and firearms. Homestead's Resource/Patrol Officer A.J. Pape presented the idea of full-time police dog for the school to the Southwest Allen County Schools board in March to supplement the district's No Alcohol No Drugs campaign. He has spent the last three months training with Hunter – a former hunting dog donated to the Allen County Sheriff's Department. [continues 757 words]
Husband Withdraws Guilty Plea, To Stand Trial A 28-year-old woman was sentenced to 180 days in jail for using Bibles to smuggle cocaine to her husband inside the Huntington County Jail, but a judge rejected her husband's guilty plea for the same offense. Amy Duckworth, 28, of the 700 block of North Lafontaine Street, offered a tearful apology Monday morning to Huntington Circuit Judge Pro Tem Thomas Hakes. "I wasn't thinking about my children," she said, reading from a statement. "It only took one time (getting into trouble) to learn my lesson." [continues 482 words]
Survey Finds Record Set For Meth, Heroin The use of injected drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine and steroids is at an all-time high for high school seniors statewide, according to a survey released Monday by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center. The number of students injecting drugs has increased from 1.8 percent in 2001 to 2.2 percent in 2006. Statistics for the northeast part of Indiana, which includes Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wells and Whitley counties, mirrored the statewide average. [continues 679 words]
Pipe Usage Also Rises, Researchers Discover There has been a shift from cigarette smoking toward chewing and pipe tobacco among high school students in the past year, according to a survey released Monday by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center. Reported use of cigarettes among high school students remained unchanged from a drop seen in 2005, while use of chewing tobacco and pipe smoking increased in grades 10 through 12 statewide. Ruth Gassman, executive director of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center, said she didn't know what to attribute the change to but said a lot of prevention effort has been focused solely on cigarette smoking. [continues 234 words]
HARTFORD CITY - A growing number of overdoses of prescription drugs including the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl has caught the attention of Blackford County officials. They met this week to discuss some alarming statistics, including at least nine deaths attributed to "mixed-drug intoxication" in the county since 2003. Local ambulance runs for the first five months of 2006 include 30 known drug overdoses and 146 for patients having "altered levels" of consciousness. Detective Jack Beckley, in a statement issued by the Hartford City Police Department on Wednesday, noted the irony that prescription drugs are distributed by doctors "here to heal us and improve our quality of life." [continues 244 words]
The number of methamphetamine labs seized in Indiana dropped significantly in the year after the state restricted the sale of products used to make the drug. Officials say the new law had an immediate effect by making it more difficult for meth manufacturers to obtain cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine. Lab seizures dropped about 24 percent, according to the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute. Indiana's law took effect July 1, 2005. In the fiscal year that followed - from July 1, 2005, through June 30, 2006 - police discovered 846 labs, compared with 1,109 in the previous fiscal year. [continues 535 words]
WASHINGTON - For the nation's forest rangers, the serenity of the woods increasingly is giving way to confrontations with unruly visitors. Attacks, threats and lesser altercations involving Forest Service workers reached an all-time high last year, according to government documents obtained by a public employees' advocacy group. Incidents ranged from gunshots to stalking and verbal abuse. The agency tally shows 477 such reports in 2005, compared with 88 logged a year earlier. The total in 2003 was 104; in 1995, it was 34. [continues 286 words]
Says Lack Of Enthusiasm Rankles Congress President Bush risks losing congressional support for some aspects of his anti-drug program because the White House downplays the seriousness of the meth epidemic, Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, said Friday. He said members of Congress " Republicans and Democrats alike" are frustrated at the administration's proposal to kill the program that underwrites local drug task forces and efforts to reduce money for areas that have special drug problems. All the newest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas are trying to cope with meth, Souder told members of the Bush administration at a hearing he conducted. [continues 479 words]
Two Hoosier lawmakers have asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to reverse his plan to end Army helicopter support next year for a program that intercepts drug deals in the Bahamas. In a letter last month to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Rumsfeld said it was time after more than 20 years to shift the equipment elsewhere. The military is being stretched thin by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and other commitments around the globe. "If you withdraw the assets," Reps. Mark Souder, R-3rd, and Dan Burton, R-5th, wrote to Rumsfeld with three other Republicans, "no other agency is capable of filling the void, and another smuggling route will be left significantly undermanned." [continues 240 words]
Regarding the article, "Use fungus to destroy drug fields, Souder says" (May 29): How would we react if another country invaded the United States and sprayed poisons on our tobacco fields? With outrage, of course. Tobacco products kill about 400,000 Americans each year. All illegal drugs combined kill about 17,000 Americans each year. So who would be more "justified"? And suppose the fungus mutates into another fungus that also kills corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and potatoes? Just collateral damage, I suppose. Mesa, Ariz. [end]
